Mary I of England

Mary I of England (18 February 1516-17 November 1558) was Queen of England and Ireland from 19 July 1553 to 17 November 1558, succeeding Lady Jane Grey and preceding Elizabeth I. Mary was the daughter of King Henry VIII of England and Queen Catherine of Aragon, and she was infamous for her aggressive attempt to reverse her father's English Reformation, earning her the nickname "Bloody Mary". Her re-establishment of Catholicism as the state religion of England was reversed after her death.

Early life
Mary was born in Greenwich, London, England on 18 February 1516, the daughter of King Henry VIII of England and Queen Catherine of Aragon. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury served as her governess during her youth, and she was known as a precocious child. As a young child, she was originally betrothed to marry King Francis I of France's son Dauphin Henry, but this betrothal was later broken so that she could be betrothed to the much older Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. This betrothal, too, would fail, as Charles decided that he did not want to wait for Mary to grow older, and he instead married Isabella of Portugal in 1530.

After King Henry decided to divorce Queen Catherine, he had the two separated, with Mary being sent with her tutor to Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, while her mother was sent to another castle in the countryside. In 1533, she was stripped of her title as Princess of Wales and demoted to "Lady Mary", while her mother, formerly "Queen of England", was demoted to "Princess Dowager of Wales". Mary would suffer from irregular menstruation and depression as a young girl, possibly caused by stress. In 1536, after the downfall of Queen Anne, the rise of Queen Jane Seymour, and Henry's insistence that all nobles recognize him as the head of the Church of England and repudiate Papal authority, Mary was bullied into signing a document agreeing to her father's demands. In 1541, Margaret Pole was executed after her son Reginald Pole was implicated in a Catholic plot against King Henry. However, after Catherine Parr married the king in 1543, Parr brought the family back together, and Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth were brought back into the line of succession. For most of her brother Edward VI's reign, Mary refused to attend court or abandon her Roman Catholic faith.

Queen of England
On 6 July 1553, King Edward died from tuberculosis at the age of 15, and Edward named his aunt Mary Tudor's granddaughter Lady Jane Grey as his successor. On 10 July 1553, Jane was proclaimed Queen by John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland and his supporters. However, Mary deposed Jane on 19 July, and she entered London on 3 August 1553 on a wave of popular support. Mary had the Catholics Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner released from the Tower of London, and she had Dudley executed and Jane imprisoned. In February 1554, she had Jane executed after her father, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk became a part of a rebellion against Mary's rule.

On 25 July 1554, after crushing Wyatt's Rebellion, Queen Mary decided to marry Prince Philip of Spain, creating an alliance with the Catholic Habsburg dynasty. This marriage proved unpopular among many English people, who feared that, as Philip was now the jure uxoris King of England, the country would become a Habsburg dependency. Mary implemented Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted Protestant clergymen, earning the nickname "Bloody Mary" for her violent suppression of Protestantism (including the execution of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer). In 1557, she was persuaded by Philip to enter the war against France during the Italian War of 1551-59, but this war would prove ruinous, as England lost Calais as a result. Mary fell ill from uterine cancer in 1558, and she did not have any children; she was forced to accept her sister Elizabeth as her successor. She died in November 1558.